Meeting a quality “life partner” online through the various dating websites is challenging because the information stated on a candidate's portfolio or profile is not always accurate. Dating websites do not check the validity of a person's qualities, such as physical attributes, past relationships, personalities, etc. Generally, visitors to dating websites are welcome to write up “stretched” information about who they are and what they are looking for. For those who are looking for “life partners,” the dating websites do no always provide satisfactory results. A similar situation exists for other websites that allow a user to search for business partners. Throughout this disclosure, a website that focuses on searching for life partners or business partners is referred to as partner seeking website.
A social network is a social structure (e.g., community) made of members (e.g., a person or a user) connected by social relationships such as friendship, kinship, relationships of beliefs, knowledge, prestige, culture, etc. Individual computers linked electronically could form the basis of computer mediated social interaction and networking within a social network community. A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are message based and provide a variety of ways (e.g., e-mail, instant messaging service, etc.) for users (or members) to interact socially via social network messages. Throughout this disclosure, the terms “social network” and “social network service” may be used interchangeably and refer to a computer mediated social network having computer servers to facilitate social interaction among members of the social network. Examples of computer mediated social network services include Facebook® (a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc., Palo Alto, Calif.), Myspace® (a registered trademark of Myspace, Inc., Beverly Hills, Calif.), Twitter® (a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc., San Francisco, Calif.), LinkedIn® (a registered trademark of LinkedIn, Ltd., Mountain View, Calif.), etc. Certain social network services provide application programming interfaces (APIs) allowing programmatic retrieval of social network messages by third party developers.